There is a lot going on here.

[fandomonymous]

Sending this a little early for reasons that are about to be very obvious.

• Tomorrow is the first day of my lease of my new apartment!!!! It is in Woodside and it is tiny but lovely and faces west - theoretically to Manhattan, but the view is sadly mostly blocked by a nearby building. It is a third floor walk up, but honestly the walking is easy. And it's a (technically) one bedroom apartment well within my budget, officially rent stabilized, and close to all sorts of things.
  
• This does mean there is a lot of logistics to do:
  
  
  
  • I don't own much furniture, but don't have access to a car, so acquiring and/or moving nouns, whether big (I need a mattress, a bedframe, a desk, a table...) or small (how am I going to move my clothes, my craft stuff, my desktop...) is hard. There's also a handful of larger items (a bench my father made for me, so many bookshelves) that I do want to move from my parents' place to my place.
    
  • I want to paint the walls matte white instead of that horrible peach-cream that is so common in cheap rentals and also almost every space my parents have ever owned. My landlord is cool with this because it's white, which is the least racist most racist-sounding sentence I've written in a while. But I do have to do it myself, the super won't do it for me. ...Or I could hire the dude from Bi Request who I'm pretty sure has an intense (and, uh, unrequited, sorry dude) crush on me, who I know for a while was trying to paint houses for a living. It's money going into the pockets of community queers, which is great, but also it's a small enough job I probably could do it myself or myself-with-PB, and managing around the unrequited crush is hella awkward. I dunno. Thoughts, folks?
    
  • There's no blinds and no curtain rods installed, so I'm going to use a combo of tension rods for inner cafe-style translucent curtains and stick on hooks to a curtain rod for blackouts in the bedroom. I want to be very particular about the curtains since they'll be such a big visual element in the room, but also my tastes are weird, so who knows where this'll end up.
    
  • I have set up most but not all of the utilities, and changed my address at some but not all the places for which I need to change my address. I'm getting to pick up my modem and install it myself instead of waiting for a technician, which is neat and awesome, but I'm worried I won't actually be able to do it solo because of the weird layout of the unit, we'll see.
    
  • There's all the tiny nouns I never think about the fact that I need but will suddenly need - kitchen stuff, cleaning supplies, laundry stuff, trashcans, bath towels, pillows...
    
  • I am sure there's other stuff I'm forgetting. If you can think of random "what to do your first time living alone" advice, feel free to tell me!
    
  
  
• I am slowly being a slightly less crummy girlfriend. There is no map of what a healthy mono-poly neurodiverse happens-to-be-straight no-cohabitation-please relationship looks like. I should recognize that the PartnerBeast is working hard on being an excellent boyfriend - earlier in the month I wasn't taking note of that very well, and now I am trying to be more gracious and observant of all the ways he is working on the relationship, and that's helping. Moving frazzles mean I haven't talked to Andy much, but I should do that too.
  
• My mom is being remarkably chill now about the boundary I set, though we currently have the advantage of distance. Being an adult is weird. She and my dad continue to have Problems, but it's...not really my problem? I mean, it is, because I want my parents to not be sad like knives (explicit link), but like, I am not obligated to help them emotionally beyond my means and I need to remember that goddamnit. Still, I probably should like, generically text my dad about the move I guess. I worry literally anything I say will affect what they do - because they're both very good at dropping anything they're doing to hlep me if not actually help me - but also, ehhhhh, it's their decisions to make. BLAH.
  
• I continue to cook! There's been a lot of kale and sausage sautes, and stupidly simple mac and cheese. I should hunt for another recipe or two to inaugurate the new kitchen. It will probably be from Smitten Kitchen (the kale/sausage saute is from her second cookbook), because Deb Perelman is great. Though other sources for home-cook-in-tiny-kitchen accessible, solidly tested recipes would be a good idea, particularly from other cultures. I don't eat poultry or eggs but everything else is fine and I can probably access whatever ingredient you're concerned about. Suggestions welcome!
  
• In the midst of all this I continue to have a job. Before I worked on this post, I sent out an email that I was anxious about sending - basically "please don't shoot the messenger, but this thing you need from me is legitimately going to need more time and work than I was hoping". It's...weird having the strength to actually push the button and do things I don't want to do. Is this that fabled "maturity" I was taught about?
  
• Also in the midst of all of this I finished another book, Tamara Shopsins' Arbitrary Stupid Goal. It's an interesting way to do a memoir, and it's an interesting memoir of the people around Tamara (who are deeply fascinating - her dad runs the weirdest restaurant in New York City, and a family friend was fascinatingly adjacent to 70s jazz, and frankly New York in her childhood is its own character in its own right.) High recommend. I do not think I can pull off reading a book every other week and reviewing it here, at least not now with all the moving nonsense. It'd be nice to get my life stable enough to consider that, though.
  
• My friend Jim is working on a commercial roguelike for Windows/Mac/Linux called Tangledeep. I've played a little bit and it's incredibly neat, and it's leaving Early Access tomorrow! The other developer is a professional musician (zircon from OCRemix) and the overall aesthetic is very SNES-JRPG, including the music, which is super awesome. But it's also legitimately interesting as a roguelike, in ways very different from DCSS. High recommend, and not just because my friend helped make it. :)